Helping users with information disclosure decisions: potential for adaptation

Personalization relies on personal data about each individual user. Users are quite often reluctant though to disclose information about themselves and to be "tracked" by a system. We investigated whether different types of rationales (justifications) for disclosure that have been suggested in the privacy literature would increase users' willingness to divulge demographic and contextual information about themselves, and would raise their satisfaction with the system. We also looked at the effect of the order of requests, owing to findings from the literature. Our experiment with a mockup of a mobile app recommender shows that there is no single strategy that is optimal for everyone. Heuristics can be defined though that select for each user the most effective justification to raise disclosure or satisfaction, taking the user's gender, disclosure tendency, and the type of solicited personal information into account. We discuss the implications of these findings for research aimed at personalizing privacy strategies to each individual user.